blissblogger
Well-known member
'ardprog
>Mad rhythms, extravagant bombast, amazing sounds and textures. When listening to the farthest >out ‘ardcore, say Hyper-on Experience or Biochip C, in many ways I hear prog. To make that kind of music >you’d have to be a virtuoso before sampling and sequencers.
luvvit, that's a neat conceptual swerve. yeah a lot of those Hyper-On tracks have this multi-segmented thing, going through six or seven distinct phases (rather than caning an intro, groove, a bridge/breakdown, like most dance tracks) which is distinctly maximalist and proggoid and song-suitey. and seeing Hyper-On as crypto-prog would help explain the directions later taken in EZ Rollers and Flytronix, bland fusionoidizm with pretensions to spirituality (and horrible horrible record sleeves)
also "Lords of the Null Lines" and the sleevenotes on some of those Hyper-on eps you can see they're some science fiction reading dudes
and you can tell the Hyper-On guys have some serious musicality going on, they know keys, they know arrangement, i expect they were in bands before getting into sampling and Cubase
but on the whole the difference of ethos/sensibility is profound i think -- hardcore in the main doesn't have the sense of Grand Artistic Statement From On High/pomposity/sense of entitlement that runs through the whole prog era -- i doubt honestly if Rick Wakeman saw himself as this shallow sensationalist showboating type, i honestly fear he was trying to Say Something. There was that whole spate of records like Alan Parsons Project's EA Poe inspired album and the records by David Bedford like Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
the Terminator EP and Ghost EP though are pure hardcore-as-prog -- complete with sleevenotes on Ghosts -- and perhaps cyberpunk cinema functioning for Goldie as literature did for the prog guys, post-literate culture innit.
mostly though the spirit in your classic era of ardcore is antipretentious, there's no overblown conception of what they're doing as Art. i do see the main spirit of ardcore as very 60s small p punk, Lester Bangsoid -- and then the split then occurs that mirrors what happened to the garage punks, one lot going psych/prog, and the other lot going metal -- and that split would be roughly equiv to drum'n'bass versus happy hardcore
>Yes
actually when i listened to some of their early stuff i was surprised how aggressively played and tight it was -- i still didn't luv it, though. i think the problem relates to the pomposity/profundity-aspiration thing as mentioned above -- which is more or less summed up in Yes' case in the name 'Jon Anderson'. his high spiritualized vocals consistently irritate.
i suppose the radical move would not be to say "oh prog isn't that bombastic/selfindulgent/showoffy actually" but to revalorize those terms. for instance, listening to goblin every so often my inner punk would say 'i'm really enjoying this but it's a bit slick and flashy innit' and then i'd think 'well who says 'slick' and 'flashy' are bad qualities'. in many other areas of music -- say 70s funk -- those are good things to be.
>Mad rhythms, extravagant bombast, amazing sounds and textures. When listening to the farthest >out ‘ardcore, say Hyper-on Experience or Biochip C, in many ways I hear prog. To make that kind of music >you’d have to be a virtuoso before sampling and sequencers.
luvvit, that's a neat conceptual swerve. yeah a lot of those Hyper-On tracks have this multi-segmented thing, going through six or seven distinct phases (rather than caning an intro, groove, a bridge/breakdown, like most dance tracks) which is distinctly maximalist and proggoid and song-suitey. and seeing Hyper-On as crypto-prog would help explain the directions later taken in EZ Rollers and Flytronix, bland fusionoidizm with pretensions to spirituality (and horrible horrible record sleeves)
also "Lords of the Null Lines" and the sleevenotes on some of those Hyper-on eps you can see they're some science fiction reading dudes
and you can tell the Hyper-On guys have some serious musicality going on, they know keys, they know arrangement, i expect they were in bands before getting into sampling and Cubase
but on the whole the difference of ethos/sensibility is profound i think -- hardcore in the main doesn't have the sense of Grand Artistic Statement From On High/pomposity/sense of entitlement that runs through the whole prog era -- i doubt honestly if Rick Wakeman saw himself as this shallow sensationalist showboating type, i honestly fear he was trying to Say Something. There was that whole spate of records like Alan Parsons Project's EA Poe inspired album and the records by David Bedford like Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
the Terminator EP and Ghost EP though are pure hardcore-as-prog -- complete with sleevenotes on Ghosts -- and perhaps cyberpunk cinema functioning for Goldie as literature did for the prog guys, post-literate culture innit.
mostly though the spirit in your classic era of ardcore is antipretentious, there's no overblown conception of what they're doing as Art. i do see the main spirit of ardcore as very 60s small p punk, Lester Bangsoid -- and then the split then occurs that mirrors what happened to the garage punks, one lot going psych/prog, and the other lot going metal -- and that split would be roughly equiv to drum'n'bass versus happy hardcore
>Yes
actually when i listened to some of their early stuff i was surprised how aggressively played and tight it was -- i still didn't luv it, though. i think the problem relates to the pomposity/profundity-aspiration thing as mentioned above -- which is more or less summed up in Yes' case in the name 'Jon Anderson'. his high spiritualized vocals consistently irritate.
i suppose the radical move would not be to say "oh prog isn't that bombastic/selfindulgent/showoffy actually" but to revalorize those terms. for instance, listening to goblin every so often my inner punk would say 'i'm really enjoying this but it's a bit slick and flashy innit' and then i'd think 'well who says 'slick' and 'flashy' are bad qualities'. in many other areas of music -- say 70s funk -- those are good things to be.